


I feel like a person (for a moment of my life)

by wyrmy



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A little, Aziraphale Swears (Good Omens), Canon Compliant, Crowely is a hopeless romantic, Cuddling & Snuggling, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Manuscript making, Post-Canon, an excuse for me to show off my useless university knowledge, canon-typical alcohol use, internalized transphobia possibly, paintings of snakes are something that can be so personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29382705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyrmy/pseuds/wyrmy
Summary: Aziraphale chooses to do a lot of things the human way, even though it makes it more difficult. Crowley begins to understand why.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	I feel like a person (for a moment of my life)

**Author's Note:**

> T rating is for language. there is a lot of drinking in this fic

2004

“Hey Angel!” called Crowley as he barged into the bookshop at the extraordinarily early hour of half-past noon on a Saturday. He may or may not have been still a little blotto from the night before.

“Really, Crowley!” came Aziraphale’s bitchiest voice from the backroom. “I do wish you wouldn’t startle me so.” And then he rounded the corner.

For a second, before Crowley could properly process what he was looking at, he thought that Aziraphale had somehow broken a feather, or worse still, pulled one out, because in his hand was a white feather and tip was dripping something red onto the floorboards. But Crowley then saw how it had been trimmed down and realized it was a quill pen.

“What were you doing with a quill pen?” he asked.

Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height. “I was rubricating,” he said in a solemn and self-important voice. “And you very nearly startled me into making a mistake.”

“You could have just miracled it away,” said Crowley, once he was looking down at the beautiful manuscript that Aziraphale had been working on. The main text, and what looked like a commentary, had been filled in with a beautiful insular hand, and Aziraphale’s rubrications were in evidence, splashes of brilliant crimson here and there. 

“It would be cheating,” said Aziraphale. “I told you when I started this book-”

“-About a thousand years ago-”

“- that I wanted to do to the human way. Besides, it’s more fun.”

“Your definition of fun is unique,” said Crowley with an eye-roll. But when Aziraphale bent back over his parchment, pen in hand, he did look genuinely happy. 

*

The first thing that Crowley noticed when he woke up was that he felt like shit. The thing he was lying on, the taste in his mouth, the pounding in his tiny brain, the noises in his ears, the heaving, nasty darkness in his eyelids, all of it was as shitty and scummy as a pond that was also a toilet. Eventually he began to process the noise he heard as a sort of pained groaning. A very familiar pained groaning.

“Oh god, did we not sober up last night?” it was Aziraphale’s voice, and it was close by.

“Narrt, I mean no,” moaned Crowley. 

“Oh bugger me. It’ll be hellishly difficult to miracle away this f- this bloody hangover. Oh I-” Aziraphale’s voice fell suddenly silent. 

“Goodness,” he said. “I am sorry.”

Crowley realized abruptly why Aziraphale’s voice sounded so close, and indeed what it was because he was lying on top of its owner. He scrambled off with undignified haste and ended up bruised and wretched on the floor. But fully clothed. Thank Satan, fully clothed.

“I think we had another drunken cuddle again last night.” He tried to keep his voice as neutral as he could, as if this was something that perfectly ordinary adversaries did with each other every day.

Aziraphale, who had just sat up and was looking even more forlorn than usual, didn’t reply. He just got painfully to his feet and hobbled into the back room to put on the kettle. When he was came back slightly more than three minutes later with some tea on a tray, Crowley had managed to wrangle himself back onto his couch and had smoothed down the more ludicrous configurations of his hair.

“Good morning, my dear,” said Aziraphale warmly, putting down his tray.

“Oh bl- thank you,” said Crowley, reaching for his devil-motif cup. When he’d taken a few sips and a small amount of the noxious miasma in his brain had started to clear, he looked over at his adversary, sitting with deliberate good posture and a sour expression in his armchair.

“What’s on your face?”

“On my-?” Aziraphale lifted a hand to his cheek. “Oh! It’s called facial hair, dear boy.”

“Never seen you with a beard before”

“I’m not growing a beard. I just like having it.”

“You wot, you shave it off every morning?”

“Unless my barber does. Don’t you like it?”

“I feel very neutral about it. Looks fine. Just don’t know why.”

“It’s human,” said Aziraphale wistfully.

*

Aziraphale went clothes shopping and dragged Crowley along for part of it, not fully trusting his own judgement on some matters. When things didn’t fit properly, he brought them home and did the alterations himself on his ancient sewing machine. 

“It’s a hobby! Honestly Crowley. I know you create all your clothes from pure firmament, but don’t you ever get bored?”

*

They were getting drunk again.

Bottles littered the table between them, the desk behind Aziraphale, and the floor. 

Crowley was loudly improvising some hysterically funny (so he thought) lyrics to the music on the gramophone, when he noticed Aziraphale wasn’t even slightly amused. He was holding his wineglass up to face and leaning his cheek into it, staring blankly into the middle distance. 

“Wasss wrong, angel?” said Crowley, sitting down and managing to find the sofa with his bottom on the second try.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” sighed the angel, still looking off into the distance like a sad puppy.

“Ssss’not nothing. C’mon. Tell me. Lemme help.”

“It’s- it’s… d’you ever wish you were human?”

“Uhhhh,” Crowley was suddenly a little concerned about where this conversation was going. 

“Not mortal, just human.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I think about it a lot. Love humans. Wish I was one. I feel so guilty about deceiving them.”

“Deceiving is maybe a strong word.”

“I make them think I’m a gay man. They’d probably hate me if they knew I’m not.”

“How’re you not gay?” Aziraphale was among the gayest people Crowley had ever met, and that was saying something.

“Cos I’m an angel! We can’t ever be gay. Or men. Or any gender. Humans- humans can choose one. Or two. S’many genders as they like. But I’m just an angel. And there’s no one in creation who’s like me. ‘Cept you.”

“But if you were human, then you could be gay,” said Crowley, who was still trying to sort it all out in his head.

“Yeah. Could be gay, n’ then when all the gay people saw me n’ liked me for being gay, then they’d be right. And it would be so lovely. So much easier than having to lie.”

“I suppose I never thought of it that way. Demons don’t tend to talk about gender.”

“Wish I was a man.”

*

“How’s your manuscript project going,” asked Crowley one day, out of the blue, while they were working out the distribution of labour for the next year’s worth of assignments. Aziraphale seemed happy to have a reprieve.

“Why don’t I show you?” he said, beaming.

He bent and shuffled about some heaps of papers before straightening up again, holding a thick stack of parchment quires. 

“What’s the text?” said Crowley.

“Oh it’s um. It’s the bible, actually. With my own annotations.”

“Gosh. That’s a project.”

“Well yes.”

“May I?”

Aziraphale passed them over and Crowley began slowly scanning through the pages.

“I didn’t know you were illuminating this.”

“I wasn’t initially, but,” he shrugged, “why not? It adds a bit of an extra challenge.”

Crowley was astonished by the illustrations. Glowing with gold leaf, they seemed to levitate out of the pages, detailed and highly coloured as they were. Aziraphale’s penmanship was superb, and his use of colour, his blending of different artistic styles from different places and times… and yet there were also places where he’d made errors. Sometimes parts of the text were squished awkwardly into a space that was too small, or else he had had to scrape a mistake off the parchment’s surface. It was endearing, and fascinating to think that he had done all of this painstakingly, humanly, on his own. It was humbling too.

He turned the page and was confronted with an enormous serpent, which coiled and twined around a gigantic letter C. Its belly had been illuminated in gold leaf.

“Is this… me?’ he asked, hardly daring to say it out loud.

Aziraphale’s face reddened. “Yes,” he said.

“You made me look…” there were no words. The serpent was beautiful, delicate, glowing more brightly than the halo of a saint on the opposite page. Aziraphale had made him look beautiful. He changed the subject. “The art is beautiful. I love it.”

“I’m not as creative as humans are, but I did take some liberties. It was rather fun.”

Crowley had never been much of a one for art. Oh, he’d known artists, over the years, encouraged them, tempted them, bought their work. But he’d never actually done any art of his own. Somehow it had seemed pointless.

That evening he went and enrolled himself in a beginner’s watercolour class.

*

The teacher did not like Crowley, he was sure. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t laid on the charm, he was a demon after all. The problem was that he struggled with his own reasoning in committing himself to this project. He knew how the pictures looked in his head. If he used a miracle, he could just put it down on paper without so much as lifting a finger. 

But that wasn’t the commitment he’d made, and keeping to that commitment was making him surly.

His fingers, on their own, were not clever. They shook, they were halting and uncertain. They were human, bony, awkward. But when his resolve started to crumble, he thought back to the beautiful manuscript that Aziraphale had been laboring over for a millennium or more. He thought of Aziraphale preparing the parchment, Aziraphale making the ink, Aziraphale bent over hour after hour, carefully writing each letter imperfectly, uncertainly. Once Aziraphale was finished decorating he was going to sew the pages together, make a beautiful cover for his book… labor after labor. And Crowley couldn’t have done any of it, not really.

So he was going to paint the blood papier-mache pears or whatever they were supposed to be if it ki- discorporated him. One of these days he was going to get good enough that, like Aziraphale with his stack of quires, he’d be able to hold something in his hands and say: I made this.

*

2022

Crowley had been working on his magnum opus for a while now. It was a painting, about a foot tall. He had had a photo for a reference, and he had worked on it secretly whenever he had the time. Usually under cover of darkness, when he would much, much rather be sleeping.

But it was done. He’d taken it to be framed the human way, which he felt weirdly smug about (how the tables turn!)

Now it was ready.

“C’mon, angel, I’ve got something for you.”

“For me?” Aziraphale was befuddled. He raised his head up from the crossword only reluctantly. 

“You’ll like it. It’s worth leaving your crossword for. I guarantee it.”

Aziraphale looked skeptical of this claim, but he stood. He allowed Crowley to lead him through their shared house to the garage. Standing outside it, Crowley ordered him to close his eyes. Aziraphale sighed in a put-upon way but did as he was told.

Then Crowley opened the door, led him inside, stood him opposite where the painting was propped up on its easel, and said, “Open.”

“Oh my Lord, Crowley. Oh darling. I had no idea you could paint. You’re brilliant. And that’s- that’s me. You’ve painted my portrait. Oh goodness.” He laughed and put an arm around Crowley’s waist. “I’m somewhat at a loss for words. This is-”

“Read what it says on the bottom.”

Aziraphale squinted a little (even though he didn’t have to), to make out what was inscribed on the painting. 

“It says, “Portrait of my husband,”” he read. “Do you consider me your husband, and not just your spouse?”

“I consider you my husband, in the most human possible use of the term.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know a little bit about Medieval manuscript making techniques and I wanted to use that knowledge to write soppy fic.
> 
> Quire: a bunch of pages, an even number like 12 that are all folded together in the early stages of making a manuscript. only after all the writing and decorating is done are the various quires sewn together into the binding.
> 
> Rubrication: the process of adding red ink to a manuscript. Most of the text was written in black, but things like instructions, important capitals, verse numbers etc. were done in red afterwards. 
> 
> Illumination: the process of adding gold or sliver leaf to a manuscript.
> 
> Insular: a script used exclusively in early medieval manuscripts from the British Isles. Aziraphale is an Englishman, after all.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments are so very, very appreciated. also i did this one super fast so let me know if there are any spelling errors lol.
> 
> ETA: if Aziraphale's gender feelings here resonate with you, I'd like to remind you that you can be any gender you like! good luck!


End file.
